The Left and the Mullahs in Iran

One may argue over many flaws of Communism and its historical
mistakes or ideological inadaptability to democracy. In Iran,
however, Communism has been stained with co-religionists and this is
a sticky stain which has not been removed since the 1979 revolution.

After the Iranian revolution, Marxist-Leninist “OIPFG”
(People’s Organisation of Fedayeen Guerrillas), the most popular
leftist movement of contemporary Iranian history, is a typical
example of such stigma. Needless to say, there were leftist
intellectuals and small groups who did not bow to the supremacy of
Khomeini. In this article, the word “left or leftist” will only
refer to the pro-Soviet political bodies, namely the Tudeh Party
and a faction of OIPFG, called Majority. They were both engineered
by the Kremlin to unconditionally support the “anti-American”
Islamic Revolutionaries of Iran (IRI). Majority was created
resulting from a split in the OIPFG in 1980. The other part of
this organisation, called Minority, continued fighting the
“bourgeois” IRI alongside several other leftist groups; these
opposition groups were systematically and gradually slaughtered,
dispelled, or dismantled by the regime.

The OIPFG was founded by a group of young educated or student
revolutionaries at the end of the 1960s. It proclaimed its struggle
in 1971, when a group of armed Fedayeens captured a rural police
station called “Siahkal”. Regarding the absolute dictatorship of the
Shah’s regime, they believed that acquiring freedom and social
justice can only occur within armed struggles of the revolutionary
vanguard, which, in turn, will culminate in a mass revolution. Other
“non-violent” ways were considered complaisant and ineffective, both
due to the failed experiences of Tudeh Party and Front National (a
large pro-Mossadegh spectrum). These two main opposition groups were
not able to mobilise people against the Shah’s absolute
dictatorship.

Considering the international unrest of the 1960s, the terms,
like terrorism, adventurism, petit bourgeois utopia etc., were not
labels of such armed movements at that time. France and Germany were
overwhelmed by student demonstrations in May 1968, almost causing a
revolutionary situation in France. Numerous left-wing groups emerged
in Germany, Italy, France and other Western countries. Armed groups
like the IRA in North Ireland and ETA in Basque were involved in
armed struggles. Revolutionary activities in Latin America attracted
popular support in European youth. Their struggles were considered a
“heroic” exercise of people’s freedom. Even European states
(especially those headed by Socialist or Social Democratic parties)
had to consider the sympathy of their intelligentsia for such
revolutionary and anti-American movements. Castro’s idea of
“bullets, not ballots, were the way to achieve power” had political
sense. Régis Debray became Mitterrand’s adviser for Latin America.
He was a co-fighter of Che Guevara in Bolivia in 1967 and a
revolutionary author whose book, ”Revolution in Revolution”,
inspired the Fedayeens.

Needless to say that armed struggles were then spared of
any connotation of terrorism or political Islam. A great number of
Western youth with leftist or alternative worldview had sympathy for
Palestine Liberation Front; they used to wear a Palestinian scarf as
a sign of their solidarity with Palestinian militants. The Front
represented more than a passing similarity to today’s appealing
Islamist groups, Hamas and Hezbollah.

Although the socio-economic conditions, that favoured armed
struggles in Latin America, were not similar to those of an Islamic
society like Iran, the Fedayeens’ armed struggle was largely
inspired from the communist revolutionary experiences in Latin
America. They theorised that armed struggles would promote a mass
revolution in Iran as happened in Cuba. There is not a page of
history from the early founders of Fedayeens dealing with Islam and
its role in such a revolution. In their analyses, an important
social factor like Islam is completely absent.

Contrary to some priests in Latin America, Mullahs in Iran could
never reconcile with collectivism, socialism and materialism of the
left. From Safavid Dynasty to the Shah (except under 16-year Reza
Shah‘s reign), the Iranian clergy or Mullahs have always created a
common bond with the monarchy. This alliance was later used by
colonial powers to keep the status quo. A 16-year period under Reza
Shah aside, Mullahs have been growing their socio-political power
since the compelling “Shiitisation” of Iran by the Safavids in 16th
century. In the 1960s, Ayatollah Khomeini opposed Shah’s land reform
and right of voting to women; hence, he organized an Islamic
movement opposed to Shah’s “un-Islamic reforms.”

Neither Tudeh party, a pro-USSR party, nor Marxist-Leninist OIPFG,
could introduce Marx’s view, that "Religion is the opiate of the
masses”, into their social analyses; instead, they considered
“anti-imperialist” Muslim movements as their strategic allies. It is
no wonder then that, after the Iranian revolution, the leftist Tudeh
Party and the Majority (non-pro-Soviet)—despite
their previous rivalry and deepening friction—came
together to unconditionally support “anti-imperialist” Khomeini and
his Islamist movement, until these “profane atheists”, like other
leftists, succumbed under Khomeini’s Islamic sword in 1982.

Their blind support of the Islamic regime reached a treacherous
level, namely their collaboration with the repressive Islamists and
right-wing paramilitary thugs of the regime, who were engaged in a
nationwide campaign of identifying and arresting the “agents of
imperialism”. Many thousands of these so-called “agents”, including
a number of minors, were executed. A great number of these victims
were teens or young people, who were murdered for demanding basic
freedom and democracy.

The working class, that these pseudo-leftists pretended to
support, lost the little rights they had won during the revolution,
which they attempted, in vain, to keep after the revolution. Their
new independent trade unions were banned and replaced by Islamic
societies formed by the Ministry of Labour. Their profit share and
bonuses, established under the Shah, were nullified. The right of
strike was disbanded. Wages remained low; many factories were shut
down; and their workers were fired without any unemployment benefit.
As they took to protests, many workers were arrested, jailed, and
executed by the Islamic regime. Still, this spectrum of the left
continued supporting the Mullahs’ regime.

For this genre of the Iranian left, things like human rights,
individual freedom, women’s rights etc. were not any concern. They
were preoccupied with divisions based on class, ideology, and any
class-related antagonistic factors. In this perspective, they argued
that the domestic capitalists consistently represented interests of
the imperialists and all that mattered; the role of Mullahs and
their traditional ties with feudalism and traditional capitalism was
selectively ignored. In his famous book, History of Thirty Years,
Bijan Jazani, a founder of Marxist-Leninist OIPFG, gave an
overwhelmingly credit to Ayatollah Khomeini as a “revolutionary”
Mullah of “petite bourgeoisie”. The 14 centuries-old Islamic laws,
Sharia, under Khomeini’s “Velayt-e-Faghih” (God’s state), which was
described in Khomeini’s book was amazingly ignored by the left from
then on. Khomeini had these fascist, misogynist, and anti-socialist
ideas before the 1979 revolution; still, he was accepted and praised
by a spectrum of the left as a symbol of struggle against the Shah.
To conclude, Islam as a divisive or a monolithic factor was not
taken into account by these leftists.

The British colonists, in their attempt to maintain commercial
monopolies and economic resources in Iran, played their part in
propping up the Mullahs too. They used religion to maintain their
hold over the vast colonies. When democratically elected popular
Iranian PM Mossadegh nationalized the Iranian oil industry, putting
this vital resource out of the British hand, the US-UK engineered a
coup that ousted PM Mossadegh. He was replaced by the Shah, a
despot. The clergy, led by mighty Ayatollah Kashani—an influential
Mullah, who had already sworn to topple the democratically elected
government—played a vital role in ousting Mossadeqh.

The establishment of the communist states in the 20th century was—for
some leftist Muslim activists like the People’s Mojahedin
Organisation of Iran—a pole of
anti-colonialism, a political alliance to bolster an
anti-capitalist, anti-West front, whereas for Shiite Mullahs (like
Khomeini), “communism is the atheism” and hence was demonised as a
“Kufr” (profanity). The emergence of Marxism was seen by Islamic
movements, especially by the Iranian Mullahs, as an alien demon to
undermine the religious society. Although the Islamist political
entities have Stalinist methods of organisation, they are more
anti-communist than anti-West. The atheist culture and legacy of
communism is a much bigger problem and more dangerous enemy than
Western colonialism. Communism has always remained the main
challenge to any Islamic political body in the favour of the
colonial power of British Empire or US hegemony.

This anti-socialist character of Islamic movements in general and
particularly that of Shiite Mullahs in Iran was the missing link,
which could not connect a big spectrum of Iranian left with the
reality. They fell into the Khomeini’s trap, what finally cost them
thousands of lives besides a bad reputation.

Born in Iran, Jahanshah Rashidian studied
psychology in France and is currently a German national. He is a freelancer and writes on democracy,
secularism, and human rights issues in several languages. He maintains
a blog at
Jahanshah Rashidian.